Senior Games Pipeline Developer - Open Digital Asset (ODA)

Sony Pictures Imageworks•Vancouver, BC

35d

About The Position

We’re looking for a Senior Pipeline / Tools Developer with strong games and engine experience to help design, build and implement the Open Digital Asset (ODA) platform — a framework for exchanging standardized, high-fidelity 3D assets across studios and pipelines. The ODA mission is to drastically reduce technical barriers and complexity in sharing 3D assets across the Sony Entertainment landscape, thereby unlocking creative collaboration and transmedia production opportunities. Following from an initial prototype and then establishing a low-friction asset exchange across Sony Entertainment, the program aims to promote adoption further across the wider industry. The Open Digital Asset project is built on the belief that harnessing universal standards for interchange and collaboration in digital media is instrumental for the industry as a whole. This role sits at the intersection of USD architecture, real-world studio pipelines, game engines and open standards You’ll work closely with the Principal Engineer and partner directly with Sony Interactive Entertainment studios to ensure ODA provides concrete, near-term value for games teams. If you enjoy solving messy interoperability problems, care deeply about the benefit of standards, and want your work to make an impact on the industry at large, then this role is for you.

Requirements

Extensive experience as a pipeline, tools, or engine-facing developer in games, VFX, or animation, ideally 4 - 6+ years
Strong working knowledge of USD, including composition arcs, variants, layers, kinds, payloads, attributes semantics and scene graph structure
Hands-on experience integrating assets with game engines (knowledge of Unreal is valuable)
Advanced high performance language skills (eg. C++, Rust)
Working Python development skills, including maintainable libraries and command-line toolingAbility to conduct design discussions, code reviews and quality analysis
Practical experience with real-time asset constraints: LODs, memory budgets, engine metadata, and runtime-friendly structures
Solid understanding of DCC pipelines (eg. Maya, Houdini, Blender) and how data moves between DCCs and engines/
Experience with asset identity, versioning, packaging, and interchange across teams or studios
Ability to debug, restructure, and reason about complex USD assets
Strong judgment balancing technical correctness with usability for artists and tech artists

Nice To Haves

Experience building or maintaining Unreal and/or game engine import/export pipelines
Familiarity with MaterialX, USDShade, and real-time material translation challenges
Experience preserving and round-tripping engine-specific metadata or custom schemas
Background in outsourcing, co-development, or cross-studio asset sharing
Experience with validation frameworks, automated QA, or schema-based checks for assets
Exposure to open standards and industry initiatives (OpenUSD, AOUSD, ASWF)

Responsibilities

Design and implement USD-based tooling to package, validate, transform, and exchange production assets for use in and out of game engines
Develop and refine workflows that support DCC -> ODA -> Engine -> ODA round-tripping while preserving structure, metadata, and artistic intent
Work directly with real game production assets (characters, props, environments) to validate solutions under real-world constraints
Build Python APIs, CLI tools, and engine-adjacent utilities that translate studio- and engine-specific representations into standardized ODA packages—and back again
Partner with engine, tools, and tech-art teams to integrate ODA concepts into Unreal or proprietary engines with minimal disruption
Contribute to technical documentation, specifications, and reference examples that make ODA understandable and adoptable by game teams
Participate in design discussions around asset identity, provenance, versioning, metadata persistence, and cross-engine round-trip workflows
Contribute to the evolution of ODA as an emerging open-source standard